Posted
by
timothyon Sunday June 17, 2012 @06:59PM
from the addition-problem dept.

Anthony_Cargile writes "Everyone thinks of Google Plus as a social networking website competing with Facebook, but that is no longer the case — even Google recognizes its failure in that regard. But in a meeting with Sergey Brin and Larry Page shortly before his death, Steve Jobs gave key advice as to what direction to take their company with regards to Google Plus, as is evidenced by their controversial new 'umbrella' privacy policy that went in effect this year. Privacy advocates beware, as the problem is almost certainly worse than ever anticipated."

Even dead, Steve is far more interesting than all of/. commentators put together, more interesting than almost every CEO in the entire tech industry.

Steve & Steve (Jobs/Woz) formed the very computer industry you are enjoying now. No, it was NOT IBM. Their PC came out AFTER the Apple I/II as a response.Steve was tremendously influential in the Music, Movie, Smartphone, Computer, Retail sections.

Apple haters tend to loath him and Apple. But you totally underestimate what a world without Apple would look

Even dead, Steve is far more interesting than all of/. commentators put together, more interesting than almost every CEO in the entire tech industry.[snip]

Think about it next time you bash Apple.

That's what they said about Aristotle every time someone challenged some aspect of the great man's system. Maybe that's why it took 1800 years for the heliocentric model of the solar system, and the experimental basis of science, to gain any traction.

Just because someone has impressive stature doesn't mean that everything s/he did has to be worshipped and parrotted.

Aristotle was the "father of the experimental method" - he advocated looking at Nature. It wasn't his fault that a load of medieval schoolmen got completely the wrong end of the stick and decided that what he wrote was right for all time. Aristotle wasn't an Aristotelian. But then, Jesus would have made a very bad Christian and Karl Marx would have been horrified by what become of Marxism.

Coincidentally I was reading The Big Short the other day and it was about a very similar theme - how human beings seem to want collectively to believe in something no matter that it is obviously bullshit, and that the people who try to point out that the emperor is naked get no thanks - they even seem to get blamed when the system collapses due to its unsustainability. There is not a lot of difference in principle between believing in the medieval idea of Heaven and believing that junk mortgages could be made AAA by clever repackaging, and that nothing bad would happen.

Marx wanted to find out the truth underlying human society. Jobs wanted to find out what would best satisfy the desires for gadgetry of middle and upper middle class Americans. They were both pretty good at what they did (Marx's analysis of capitalism has turned out about 100% correct), but in the case of Marx his followers screwed up. I strongly expect Jobs's successors to do exactly the same.

Aristotle was the "father of the experimental method" - he advocated looking at Nature.

This is only half-correct. Aristotle formalized empiricism [wikipedia.org], but never performed or advocated experiments. The core idea of the scientific method, using experiments [wikipedia.org] to test hypotheses, would first be seen among early Islamic scientists like Alhazen [wikipedia.org], further developed by Francis Bacon [wikipedia.org] and formalized by Rene Descartes [wikipedia.org] in Discourse on the Method [wikipedia.org]. Any of the three would have a better claim to the title "father of the experimental method" than Aristotle.

And I was careless. Aristotle believed that knowledge was acquired by sensory experience, unlike Plato who thought that some kind of higher realm was primary and the observed world was, as Yeats put it "a spume that played/upon a ghostly paradigm of things". Aristotle's claim, as I observed in the second half of the sentence, was to have proposed looking at Nature for knowledge; this was quite revolutionary in a world in which people saw a deus in just about every machina. Although his cosmology was pretty strange, he at least had the idea that probably one cause accounted for the movement of things in the sky - his "that which moves without movement", [/. Greek fail]

But why cite Wikipedia when there is so much better information on early history of science? The article you cite describes Alhazen as an "early Islamic scientist" whereas he was pre-scientific, as was Francis Bacon (to whom I am very distantly related, so I have some interest in the subject). Descartes described the experimental method but was a long way from following it. You can argue that Aristotle, by proposing the validity of sensory experience as a clue to understanding the world, was the father of experimental method (experience and experiment have a common root) or you can argue that Galileo was (he actually did experiments to test his ideas), but to try and claim that the moment of truth lies somewhere in between ca. 350 BCE and ca 1600 CE is to try and measure accurately using a jelly stick.

The distortions were already creeping in during his lifetime. But, to be fair, his writing had certain ambiguities and tensions that lends itself to being misunderstood.

Jesus is an entirely different story. Briefly put, there just isn't enough evidence to make any sort of objective judgment. To say that Jesus would have rejected (or accepted) modern Christianity is to make a judgment founded upon ideological principles.

To say that Jesus would have rejected (or accepted) modern Christianity is to make a judgment founded upon ideological principles.

No, it isn't. It is based on a comparison of what is said in the New Testament versus what is propagated by several mainstream churches. Anybody who has had a theological education (guilty) and has then not had to earn a living by espousing one version or another of Christianity is free to see this and say it. To claim that this is an "ideological" issue involves a great deal of

Coincidentally I was reading The Big Short the other day and it was about a very similar theme - how human beings seem to want collectively to believe in something no matter that it is obviously bullshit, and that the people who try to point out that the emperor is naked get no thanks - they even seem to get blamed when the system collapses due to its unsustainability.

Reminds me of something Bill Hicks used to say:

The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we kill those people. "Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok

Steve was tremendously influential in the Music, Movie, Smartphone, Computer, Retail sections. Apple haters tend to loath him and Apple. But you totally underestimate what a world without Apple would look like today. It would be frightening. The PC wouldn't exist (probably) as the PC-standard was only invented as a quick&dirty effort as response to the Apple 2.

I'm not an Apple hater, but you're exagerating. Saying that the IBM-PC was an answer to the Apple ][, is as saying that the Apple ][ was an answer to IBM's 5100 [wikipedia.org]. The IBM-PC was an answer to all 70s microcomputers.

The GUI wouldn't be there where it is now. (and not Xerox wouldn't have sold it. They had only a raw prototype and their own managers said it wouldn't be marketable)

Perhaps VisiOn [wikipedia.org] or one of the other projects at the time would have happened.

Smartphones would still be in the iron grasp of carriers, filled with bloatware and branded to death. The iPhone was the first one were the carriers had ZERO influence.

That is very US-centric. Here in this part of Europe, the carriers never had any influence on smartphones at all.

Tablets would probably still be synonymous with failed Tablet-PCs featuring WinXP.

So you admit that tablets were happening before jobs. WinXP tablets were more popular than Apple's Newton. iPad was more popular than WinXP tablets.

etc, etc. No, Steve was not holy, innocent or a general good guy. Nevertheless, should he be recognised as one of the greatest figures in IT history. Yes he was that important. And no, it is not natural that someone else would have come along and did the same as Steve. Otherwise there would already be the next Rockstar CEO somewhere. But there isn't. Think about it next time you bash Apple.

Jobs was important to IT history. But he was not as important as you make him. And don't worry, new rockstars pop up all the time - they will as long as there are fans.

The C= Amgia could emulate the Macs+OS via ROM module or (copy rom as most did via BBSs). The Rom in ram ran faster. The Emulator patched some OS calls to be asyncronous and ran faster and better that a real mac did. And also ran Amiga apps at the same time as Mac Apps.

The Apple I couldn't even be truly considered a kit as it didn't come with all the parts needed to make a functional system, not to mention there were only a few hundred made and sold in a very limited geographic area.I wouldn't exactly call that any kind of major milestone in the history of computing and if you are gonna count that you would need to also count the KIM 1 released in the same year but I can't find the exact day so who knows if it was earlier or later.

Regardless MOS Tech were already working on the KIM before they could have possibly heard of Jobs so one could argue that even if Jobs had never built squat you'd have still had the birth of the home computer, as its only logical to slap something like the KIM in a box with a keyboard and a monitor hookup which is exactly what Commodore did when they bought out MOS and had the same guys build the PET. Of course once the PET hit the scene with the TRS-80 right behind it that was it, the race was on.

There's a guy around town who must not be right in the head, he's always shielding his face with one hand, has long fingernails, all black clothing, a hat, long hair, and a beard. Whenever I see him I'm tempted to tell him that whoever he thinks is watching him, he's making it really easy to track him by standing out like a sore thumb. Holding your hand over your face is not really a good way to stay incognito.

I wonder if the same isn't true for online privacy, if by caring about it and making some attempt to remain private, I've put myself on the radar for anyone who happens to be monitoring online activity.

That's how they protected Salmon Rushdie during the height of the fatwa. They would set up a conspicuous crazy, then put Salmon into the costume for one night to move him across town. Masquerading as some crazy who holds his hand in front of his face works every time.

What was the actual topic again? Oh, yeah. Picks up hammer and bashes head. Ouch. So, anyone got a bag of ice and a good digression... ?

Privacy advocates beware, as the problem is almost certainly worse than ever anticipated.

Good thing we have alternatives, right?

Well, yes and no.

There are alternatives, but no useful alternatives. The problem of the Internet is that it is very conductive to the creation of monopolies, especially when it comes to sites that rely on user input. Facebook is big because in the early days it managed to gain critical mass. This made it grow to the juggernaut it is now. Slashdot is also a site that gained critical mass, and as a result is one of the biggest IT/tech related discussion sites.

As a result, if you want to connect with friends and use an online social network, you go to Facebook, because everyone else is there already. You don't go to Google+ or any other such network, as your friends aren't there. The sheer size of Facebook is its main attraction, and this makes it also very difficult for other networks to start to compete. After all you first have to get critical mass, and that's really difficult.

Even a company like Google, with its very positive image, its huge resources, gaining enormous publicity with their start-up network (they made it to the TV news, front page of news papers worldwide, all over the tech sites) didn't manage to do this. They didn't even gain enough traction to survive as social network in a niche, like e.g. LinkedIn still survives. This just goes to show how hard it is to come with a viable alternative. The only way to come with an alternative is to link your network to Facebook, which Facebook won't allow, and still doesn't give users much of an incentive to use your network and not Facebook's.

I seem to recall that MySpace and Friendster also achieved critical mass. I think it is naive to think that Facebook will not someday be supplanted in the same way as well. The main reason why G+ is stumbling in this respect is that they don't provide anything, not even better assurances over privacy (which is something people care little enough about) that is compelling enough for people to begin to use their G+ accounts more than they use their Facebook accounts. The thing here is that social network lock-in and network effects are weaker than say, Microsoft's lock-in and network effects with Windows. In the first place, nothing really prevents me from say, using both G+ and Facebook at the same time. If G+ or some other competing social network provides something really compelling, not just to me but to large numbers of users, I'd eventually find myself using Facebook less and less, and G+ more, and at some point it'd be hard to characterize me as a "Facebook user". At this point G+ does not seem to be giving people that kind of incentive. Think back on what killed off MySpace and Friendster. Friendster I remember had problems scaling their systems to handle the increasing load, and the poor responsiveness of their site was what caused people to migrate away from them to MySpace and Facebook in the way just described. I don't quite remember what happened with MySpace, because I never did make an account there, but I believe that Facebook had a much better user experience (ads not as intrusive, easier interface, less of an ability to make garish pages, etc.), and that's what caused people to gradually migrate.

Facebook had a P/E of 88 at their IPO, which means that they'll have to increase revenue at least sixfold to live up to the expectations set by their stock price. They can't increase their userbase much more: there just aren't enough people on the planet for that. Their revenue per ad is going down, so to increase revenues they'll have to make their ads occupy more and more of their page and become more intrusive. I think doing that was part of what killed off MySpace.

MySpace: never seen that as an integrated social network like Facebook, more as a place to build your homepage (a souped-up Geocities so to say). I can't browse now it as I'm in Hong Kong, so the page is served in Chinese which I can't read, and there is no link to change that to English (or any other language)! And my browser's preferences for language are 1) Dutch, 2) English. Go figure. Not only do they ignore my browser preference, they don't allow me to override the setting.

The main reason G+ 'appears' to be stumbling is because it is Google, people expect it to win overnight. Google didn't beat Alta Vista and MSN overnight, it took some years and all G+ has to do is continue, refine and improve in favour of the customer, while Facebook is forced to continue to squeeze the screws on the customers to increase revenue and the result will be inevitable, it wont happen overnight and Google can still screw it up but if they or someone else work solidly and carefully at it, just like Myspace, Facebook will die as a fad.

Facebook has a huge user base, sure they could try and burden them with intrusive ads, and I agree that would probably doom them. However that's not their only option - they could try and add services which then make them money - like becoming a payment processor, enabling auctions (like ebay) etc. Their user base is a treasure, they have many options to build on that.

I like how the article quite randomly mentions that Jobs used to do LSD, for no apparent reason:

Quite suggestive that Page and Brin are into something, too;). However, it could also be an in-joke about enlightenment. After all, in the sixties, LSD was the shorter path to achieving oneness with the universe (the long way was to go on a pilgrimage to India). Now iimagine Jobs advising his young apprentices (disciples?) to unite their different services into the One web portal.

In other news, president Obama (and former coke-head) met with vice-president Biden (current raging meth addicts) this weekend to discuss the political campaign against Mitt Romney (disconnected asshole).

This is the same man who came up with "MobileMe" [apple.com] and Ping [apple.com]. Remember those massive failures? No? That's because the media ignores them in portraying Apple as a company that never makes a mistake.

"You're holding it wrong." "Just avoid holding it that way." "Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong."

This is the same man who came up with "MobileMe" and Ping. Remember those massive failures? No? That's because the media ignores them in portraying Apple as a company that never makes a mistake.

Where do you get off calling MobileMe a massive failure? There's a bunch of different services that existed before MobileMe, and exist under iCloud now. Some services have changed quite a bit, like Gallery to Photo Stream, iDisk is going away, and new services like Match are available for a price, while the synchronization stuff is now free.

Who says Apple doesn't make mistakes and what makes you think the media doesn't give them coverage??

Well, Steve Jobs called MobileMe and the MobileMe team a massive failure himself.

"Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, "So why the f*** doesn't it do that?" Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company's on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of "tarnishing Apple's reputation." He told the members of the team they "should hate each other for having let each other down", and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team.

What's wrong with having released services that did not succeed? The stereotype of the Apple Fanboy loves EVERYTHING that Apple puts out, simply because it's made by Apple. Those two services just show that the stereotype is not true.

Google+ gets fun to look at. Google seeds your timeline with nifty examples of posts from all different people. Like for example blogger posts stuff about making blogs.. Then Google will put random posts from different people. It's not boring like Facebook, where only your friends show up on your timeline.

I have to agree. There are less users, but they are overall more useful. I subscribe to the photography and technology groups, so I have a neverending stream of nice photos and interesting gadgets to look at on a slow news day.
In fact, I sometimes learn about new gadgets even before they pop up on slashdot.
So, G+ is aimed at a different group of people, and that being so does not make it a failure. Facebook pretty much has the market cornered with the Farmville and other online game types, G+ news seems to have more news from creative types.
Also, G+ is easy to train, and after weeding out the worst spammers, the rest is all good.
-Evert Vorster-

TFA explains it - if you're using YouTube, Google search, gmail, or any other google service, you're using Google+. It's just a big wrapper for the whole experience. No one cares if you aren't posting about drunken weekend escapades because your digital footprints are just as valuable without the meaningless banter that serves as an excuse to use the FaceTubes.

Can someone explain exactly what changed in Google's user agreement that gives them some new horrible power that they (and pretty much every other online account holder) did not already give themselves? What can Google do now that they couldn't already? I've seen so much concern about Google's new policy but very little to explain why. I briefly looked over the new policy when it came out and did not see anything that unusual. Maybe there's some more information sharing across their services, but I don't think there was much stopping that even before.

To my understanding, each google website used to be individual. Now they are connected, meaning that they can track you across all of google's websites/services. So instead of multiple files about you, they have one grand file.

Slow news day much? This article is devoid of news, consists solely of "Duh!" opinions rendered in awkward sophomoric prose, and is all too typical of the low standards of fourth-tier tech sites. "The leader in technology news and commentary"? Maybe at your particular high school.

If you think that information wasn't already communicated between groups in the company, you are hugely mistaken,The new privacy policy just made this far more clear.All the separate agreements equally allowed this.

If there is anything worse than people still bringing up how OH SO WONDERFUL STEVE JOBS is, it is the privacy nut articles.Give me another Raspberry Pi Beowulf Cluster of viral infections or whatever the hell else.Oh GOD, I just realized this is both! That's it, time for sleep. I'm done. Gone, out of here.

Didn't Google call Google+ an identity service? You can't expect privacy from an Identity Service. That would be like expecting Facebook to stop violating your privacy; they can't stop, violating your privacy IS their business model.

There's nothing in the article (yes, I read it). It's just what everyone already knew - Google+ is one more Google service and will continue to exist and act as a data source to better target their advertisements. Big deal. The actual content of the unified privacy policy remains less threatening than most, even if people continue to cower at its mere existence. The contribution that it mentions from Steve Jobs is essentially non-existent, and I've already written more than this thing deserves.

It's just what everyone already knew - Google+ is one more Google service and will continue to exist and act as a data source to better target their advertisements. Big deal.

Indeed. Personally I use Google+ nowadays on a daily basis and I know full well that Google collects some data for marketing purposes. They sell the data in large batches per demographic and anonymizes the data first, and in exchange I get to use an extremely handy platform that isn't crowded with the "Mememememe" - or "I have a 5 seconds attention span" - crowd. Sounds like a good deal to me, atleast.

Hardly an insightful comment at all - sounds more like winy and mean. Pay close attention to the timeline: the advice from Steve Jobs, at the time it came, was foresight. Comments like the above are hindsight at best, merely stating what the situation currently is. Well, guess again, since this is about the time before the situation was _created_.

Exactly! I simply don't understand why Larry Page is obsessed with trying to make Google into Apple. The reason why Google is successful is that they are NOT like Apple. The world already has an Apple. It doesn't need another. Stick with what got you here in the first place instead of trying to be something you aren't.

So I read the linked blog post, and I'm trying to figure out what the guy's real point is. The one thing that IS clear is the author's an unabashed Google fanboy and can't grasp the concept that his favorite company might be able to fail at something.

Anyway, I'm stuck deciding between two possibilities:

a) He knows in his heart of hearts that Google+ is a failure, and is trying to pin that on a non-Google person because - hey, you can't libel the dead.

[Steve Jobs] told [Larry Page and Sergey Brin] something to the effect of, "You have so many products spanning several services: Search, GMail, YouTube, Maps etc. – why not unite them all under a fluid user experience to both you and your users’ benefit?"

Page and Brin, struck with this epiphany, thought to themselves: "My God, how come we and our 30,000 highly-qualified employees never thought of this before!? This man is truly a genius!"

Was Jobs’s conversation with Brin/Page meant to stir the data giant into even more of an unstoppable data bank, or was it merely an innocent remark meant to give the users a more pleasant experience? Probably both.

Or... False dichotomy. Jobs seemed to be committed to destroy android even if it cost apple the last dollar in it's bank. Why would Jobs give "good" advice to Google to help it's bank account? Perhaps I suggest a third option. Maybe Jobs was hoping to tease google into chasing a ghost... I have no evidence, but then again, neither do the authors of this article, and at least a passive disinformation strategy makes more sense than Jobs wanting to help Google+...

They just built (bought, LOL) all these "services" over the years, and did Android, but it took Steve Fucking Jobs (RIP) to TELL them they had something that could be unified? Seriously?

Love the way Jobs was quoted: "He told them something to the effect of...'[purported quote]' ".

Sure, I imagine G's goal all along was an ID service: GOOG doesn't like the anonymity of information/posts on the internet because their main brand (Search) is serving up these pages and they want the pages to be more reliable; they want accountability on the web. (I completely disagree with the concept, but that's not the point). Apple wants a good web experience, too, but only on their hardware. No way (imo) Jobs would have said shit to Page about a homegrown social network without mentioning hardware, and he surely wouldn't have lauded Androids as the hardware (not closed enough). The companys' mindsets are way too different for these types of collaborations. (Actually, they hate each other.)

Once a federation of fairly independent product units (i.e., gmail, maps, blogger, docs etc.), Google+ now threatens to subsume each into a monolithic service. While this offers some synergies, it stratifies the organization and reduces the independence of once autonomous leaders. Google will survive the internal blowback but may never again operate as flexibly or rapidly. Ironically, most of the technical changes relate to unified authentication using OAuth. The one who controls permissions is the one

Is this the same steve jobs who vowed to kill android?Perhaps Google shouldn't be asking advice from someone who wants to kill one of their most popular products, after all disrupting google would damage android.

I don't like the kind of crap where I login to gmail and then have google's search show "btw, we know who you are" so as a small mutiny I've switched to using chrome for gmail and for everything else it's opera or firefox.

I almost certainly read the article, and I almost certainly agree with the summary. You almost certainly read the article too, in which case you almost certainly agree that this almost certainly occurred. This is almost certainly the most accurate story ever posted on/. And almost certainly, this comment will be rated +5 informative.

It is either certain, or it isn't. If it is certain, then there is no doubt evidence to back up that claim. In which case you would simply say "it is certain that... because of..." Unless you are writing an article on probability theory, then we should expect facts. Not rumor dressed up as fact.

You know what we call things reported on web blogs that are almost certain?Bullshit.

Here are some red-flag phrases the writer of the summary almost certainly read, and almost certainly ignored:"Nobody would expect...""I'm going to reveal...""It all started when...""...something to the effect of...""...easily verified via his Wikipedia page...""I'm told by people familiar with the situation...""I project that..."

Well, before I totally dismiss the article let us learn about the author. Perhaps he is a well connected business savvy insider who has connections right at the top. Let's see what the bio says:

Chris "...is a business grad student at USC who is very fluent with technology..."

Okay, I can't go on any more. I'm going to be sick. Whatever journalistic integrity I had is being sucked dry by this one. Since when did USC grad students start getting taken so seriously?